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Last week on the Today Show I mentioned DeadFred.com. It's a fun site for folks trying to reconnect with lost family photos or to post pictures if you want photos to lead the way to a reunion with lost family. It's a win-win either way.

There are a couple of other sites I'd like to mention though. If you've ever lost a camera and thought those pictures (and the camera) are gone forever, think again. There is a blog that tries to link up individuals with their equipment and precious pics. Found Cameras and Orphan Photos has a Facebook group, a link to success stories and updates every Thursday. What a fun idea! You'll see wedding images, vacation shots and candid pictures all waiting to be claimed by their rightful owner. I'll definitely be adding this to my Facebook page.

Photos aren't the only focus of a site called Ancient Faces. If you want to share and collaborate on family history you can set up a family space. Share stories, pictures and even a recipe or two. Sign up for their e-newsletter to keep up with any new developments.

This isn’t Maureen. I’m Diane from Family Tree Magazine’s Genealogy Insider blog—I'm dropping in to share the video of Maureen’s spots on NBC’s "Today" show this morning, giving tips on how to trace your roots.

She answers viewer questions in the first spot with Al Roker, and talks about photo research with Meredith Vieira.

Remember how last week I mentioned that this column would feature a "viewer discretion advised" image? The sight of a deceased person in a photo is the reason for the warning.

Like it or not, our ancestors began photographing the dead members of their family in the early 1840s. If you think you'll find such an image disturbing or unsettling, please don't continue reading.

Theresa Klepadlo-Berio submitted this photo with the following e-mail message: "I have had this photograph for years and have always wondered it it's an actual funeral or what...All I know is that it was in an old photo album of my grandparents' and they were from Poland."

It is in fact a funeral. The elderly woman in the casket is being photographed before her burial. The people surrounding her are probably family members. This picture is a key to her family history in Poland, and a a great example of how one photograph can help you connect with your heritage.

I spent a bit of time fixing the contrast and adjusting the sharpness of this image using my favorite photo editing tool—Picnik. (It's free!) Once I improved the picture the markings on the side of the coffin jumped out at me.

The words are still very difficult to read, but I took a chance and entered what I thought I saw into Google. Eureka! The words are spoczywaj w pokoju pax.

I immediately called Terri and asked her more about her family. Turns out there's a family tradition of photographing the dead! This is the only postmortem picture in her collection, but as we chatted she mentioned that her father's family used to pose relatives around the deceased. That suggests that this image here contains at least a few relatives. But who?

That's something I hope to write more about in the near future. Terri's going to send me some information on her family history. With any luck we'll be able to figure out who's who and when this was taken.

This image is also a good example of how the picture is just one piece of the family puzzle. Forensic research is needed to put the whole story together. More later...

In a related piece of news, a story this month in the Ventura County Star focused on one photographer's fine art pictures of parents with their deceased infants. Historically, mothers have long posed for a final picture with their deceased infants. The imges are usually heartbreaking and really upsetting to view. However, photographer Leila Jones' work at the Simi Valley Hospital transcends the grief. She does an amazing job of capturing these last moments.

I'll be at the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Philadelphia Sept. 2-6, and I hope I'll see you there. You can visit with me in my booth, #304, in the conference exhibit hall. It's a great chance to chat with me about your family photos or just stop by to say hi. Please do! I like meeting the folks who submit photos to this column.

At the conference, I'll also be presenting a workshop on identifying and preserving family photos. It's not too late to sign up for this special offering. You can register for the conference online until Aug. 22 at 5 p.m. Central time.

Last week the e-zine/blog Shades of the Departed asked me to write a short piece about the wedding photos I collect. I met the author of this informative and wonderful photo site, The Footnote Maven, through FaceBook. We're kindred spirits when it comes to old photos. Check out the story. I talk about seven of the images from my personal (though not my family) collection. If you've ever cried at wedding, then be advised. You'll need a tissue.

Next week I'll feature a photo in this space that'll carry a warning, "Viewer discretion advised." Now doesn't that pique your interest!

Like many of you, I'm glued to the TV and online news sources watching the Olympics. While I don't have any Olympic hopefuls in my house, there are plenty of athletes on the family tree: In one oft-told tale, my husband's grandfather had an opportunity to play for a major league baseball team, but his father made him go to law school instead.

Do you have a photo of an ancestral athlete? Send it to me and I'll share it in this space. Got a story to go with it? I'd love to hear it.

I looked through my archive of recent submissions to this column, but couldn't find a mystery family photo that fit the theme of sports. Instead, I've pulled one from the Library of Congress.

George Grantham Bain took this photo, captioned, "Champion Australian girl swimming team," April 8, 1919. Bain was a news photographer who primarily worked in New York City. Haven't found the associated news story to go with it yet, but I'm still looking.

Two weeks ago I put out a call for photos showing medical conditions. There are three images and one blog link in this post so be sure to read all the way to the end.

The inspiration for that request was a photo that Elizabeth Vollrath emailed me in May. It's a lovely 1880s photograph showing an unusual feature in her right ear. While not a medical condition, it made me think about details in photos.

Vollrath's dad inherited the split in the earlobe, showing a relationship to this unknown woman. I wondered whether she was his grandmother. I was close. A cousin later positively identified this woman as Ida Sophia Hass (b. 1866). Ida's sister Pauline Hass was Vollrath's great-great-grandmother, and her dad's great grandmother.

Diedra March sent me this photo of her great-grandfather's family.

She thinks her dad has inherited macular degeneration from this man, his mother's father. Anders Norberg appears to have something wrong with his eyes. According to March, Macular Degeneration causes blindness in your center vision, and people with the condition often look out of the corners of their eyes.

Rachel McPherson shared a photo of a school group that shows her grandmother in a leg brace (front row, fourth from right) due to polio.

My search for living descendants of the little girl in Finding Family Photos on the Web is ongoing. It's a perfect example of how not everything is on the web.

Having looked at census records and whatever else was online, I ran into a virtual brick wall—I'm sure you know the feeling. Here are some of the sources I learned about and how I located them.

A reference librarian at the Littleton, NH, public library made my day when she found an obituary for "Fontie" WELLER Fitch in the Littleton Courier, the local newspaper. After marrying Henry Fitch, Fontenella and her new husband moved to Spokane, Wash., so he could accept a job with the Washington National Bank. She gave birth to a child in January 1892, and within three months, both mother and child were deceased. Their obituaries appeared in the Littleton Courier March 16, 1892.

Since I didn't have an obituary for Fontenella's father, I went back and tried locating one using the historical newspaper subscription site GenealogyBank. I finally found it by using Weller in the surname field with Littleton as a keyword. According to the Argus and Patriot (Montpelier, Vt.) of Dec. 12, 1877, "Frank G. Weller, a well-known manufacturer of stereoscopic views, died at his residence in Littleton, NH, on Saturday, aged 44 years."

Intrigued by the use of "well-known," I set out to discover more about the man behind that beautiful photo of a girl and a flag. Just how famous was Weller, and did he take any other stereo views of his family?

A stereo view is a double picture taken with a binocular camera; it captured two slightly different images of the same view. You then used a special viewer to make the scene 3-D. Stereo views of people are rare. These
double images were entertainment—you could purchase scenes of places you'd visited (or would like to
visit) or play out with friends the tableau scenes in cards with allegorical
and literary themes.

In the 1870s, stereo photographers often created thematic scenes from literature. Without the catalog record, it's difficult to recognize the tableau below. It represents a card-playing scene from Francis Bret Harte's poem Plain Language From Truthful James. Harte was a American author who wrote about life in California.

The back of the card yielded some additional information. I wasn't aware that Weller had copyrighted his images. The stamp in the upper right hand corner provides a year for the card-playing view.

Weller was an accomplished photographer. The evidence is in the crisp quality of his images. I'd love to see more.

In the 1880s, after Weller's death, it's likely the family sold his negatives. His pictures began to be published by the Littleton View Company, and later, by the major producer of stereo views, Underwood and Underwood. Some depicted allegorical scenes, others focused on literature, and in a few instances, he took pictures of local scenes (as evidenced on a label on the back of one of his views).

But he also was one of only two photographers in the pre-1875 period who specialized in photographing children. He called this series his "Stereoscopic Treasures." Perhaps he included his daughter and her friends in "The Tea Party" and the "Girl posed with a Tablet." Unfortunatley, neither is available online for comparision. This additional information is from John Waldsmith's Stereo Views: An Illustrated History and Price Guide (Krause, $24.95).

Weller was an early stereoscopic photographer, a trailblazer in his field, who also used his talents to photograph his only child Fontenella. As far I as I know, no single repository holds Weller's images—they're in private collections or the Library of Congress. It's a pretty typical situation for a photographer's legacy.

There was a very interesting story about Pio Pico, California's last governor under Mexico, in the July 19 Los Angeles Times. "What made Pio Pico so, well, ugly?" focuses not on the political happenings of his administration, but on how a daguerreotype of him helped identify a medical condition. It's fascinating!

A neurologist compared a daguerreotype of Pico taken in 1852 with a painting of him from 1847 and another photograph from 1858. This doctor believes Pico had a condition called acromegaly, a pituitary tumor that caused his face to become mishapen. The pictorial evidence showed when he first became afflicted and when the pituitary tumor stopped growing. It's a great family photo tale.

I've received several photographs from readers of individuals with obvious medical conditions or dental problems. I'm busy tracking down the clues in those images—he evidence in those photos may be pertinent to the owners' own health history.

If you have a medically related photograph, e-mail it to me. I'd love to see it.

The Mütter Museum was founded by the College of Physicans of Philadelphia to help educate physicians. While their digital database currently contains images only of doctors, according to their Web site, the picture collection "contains images from the history of medicine,
including portraits, buildings, groups, and historical subjects." A photo book, Mutter Museum Historic Medical Photographs (Blast Books, $50) is available. Be prepared: Some of the images are disturbing.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how one genealogist created a short video about her online photo discovery. I was so intrigued by her effort that I decided to try putting together a short piece with images depicting flags. It's one of my collecting areas—I can't turn down a picture of the personification of flags and other American symbols. You can watch the video on Roots Television. It was only my second attempt at movie-making, so don't be too harsh.

One of the photos I included came from the Library of Congress and serves as a good example of how family photos can also represent history. It's a gorgeous stereo view of a young girl dressed as a symbolic figure.

According to the cataloging record, this image is Fontinelle Weller posed as Columbia, taken on March 13, 1873, by F.G. Weller of Littleton, N.H.

The 1870 census provides additional details. The girl's name was actually Fontanella A. Weller and F.G. was her father Frank G., a photographer. (You can find this record using the following citation: 1870 U.S. census. Grafton County, New Hampshire, population schedule, Littleton, p. 567, dwelling 170, family 191, Frank G. Weller citing National Archives microfilm publication M 593, roll 841.)

I used my Boston Public Library card to find Fontana on the subscription database Heritage Quest, but you can also locate her using Ancestry.com.

The depicting of individuals as symbols of America goes back to the founding of this country. Fontanella has a serious expression on her face while holding the flag. Her white Roman-style dress with a crown identifies her as "Columbia, Mother of the Republic."

In the late 18th and early 19th century, Columbia was a woman, but as seen here, in the mid-to later 19th century, she became younger. You can read more about American symbolism in David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas ( Oxford, $50).

Charles Blyth found this handsome daguerreotype in a group of identified family photographs. He thinks the man might be a colleague of his great uncle, but isn't really sure. It's beautiful and in pristine condition, so I couldn't resist this challenge.

It's important to remember daguerreotypes are reversed. Before comparing this gentleman to any family photographs, it's necessary to flip the image to see his natural appearance. Faces can look quite different when reversed.

Blyth doesn't think this man is his great uncle Henry Blyth, born in 1831, but the evidence suggests it could be. Here is the quartet of facts I've considered.

1) This man appears to be in his 20s and the clothing (wide cravat, slicked back hair and long sideburns) suggests the photo was taken in the 1850s. This man is the right age to be Blyth.

2) The equipment on the table identifies this man as a surveyor. As far as I can tell, the device is a Wye level, used for long- distance surveying. I found a similar-looking piece on Larry and Carol Meeker's Web site Antiques of a Mechanical Nature. Blyth was a surveyor in New York State before leaving home at 22 for Chile. He returned home with a beard in 1858 and posed for a portrait with his family; a few years later, he was in the card photograph (below). If the daguerreotype is Blyth, it was taken before his travels in 1853—a date that fits the clothing clues.

3) Even though Blyth's hairline is receding in this known picture, you can see the similarities between him and the unidentified portrait. Besides a similar hairline, their face shapes are close. It's not outside the realm of possibility to conclude Blyth posed for the daguerreotype before traveling to South America. This card photo shows he aged a bit from his frontier experience, but it's likely both pictures depict the same man.

4) One other feature in the daguerreotype suggests it could show Blyth: the cross. According to Charles Blyth, members of the family often posed wearing a cross.

I think the evidence strongly suggests this unidentified picture is Henry Blyth—the tools identify his trade, his age is right, facial similiarities suggest a relationship and then there's the cross and the fact the image was found with family artifacts. I think it's Blyth, but I'm not sure I've convinced the owner.

Got an opinion? Sound off in the Comments section! Let's create a dialogue.